


The Moment I Met Him

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Fringe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-11
Updated: 2013-12-11
Packaged: 2018-01-04 09:38:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1079428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Altlivia evaluates her relationships with both Lincolns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Moment I Met Him

The first time Olivia met Lincoln Lee, it was her first case on Fringe Division, and she’d been determined to prove that Colonel Broyles had been right to take a chance on handpicking her. Broyles had introduced her to Lincoln and his partner Charlie. It had immediately become clear to Olivia that they had known each other for years – since they trained together at the Academy, she later found out – and Olivia wondered how she’d ever fit in with them. But Lincoln had immediately turned to her, offered to introduce her to the other agents, made sure to explain all the in-jokes he and Charlie used.

Their first case as a team had been a pretty gruesome one involving exploding people. Once they’d closed it, Lincoln had taken her to one side and told her he’d admired the way Olivia had kept her cool throughout the whole thing. He’d admitted that it had taken him a while before he’d reached the point of being able to stomach sights like that as easily as she could. Not wanting to admit that she’d actually been trying to put on a brave face herself, Olivia had just smiled along with him. She’d thought Charlie might have had some idea, though, since he’d taken her to one side later and said to her “You’re gonna be fine”. 

Over time, it got to the point where Olivia was genuinely able to keep her cool when they were out in the field. And over time, it began to matter less that she did not share the history they did from the Academy. It wasn’t the two of them plus her. She really began to feel as though the three of them were partners.  
*****  
The first time Olivia met the other universe’s Lincoln Lee, she hadn’t been prepared for it. When she’d been Over There before, infiltrating the other Fringe Division and pretending to be Her, he hadn’t been part of the team, so she wasn’t expecting to see him. In fact, not having Lincoln and Charlie around had been one of the hardest things about being over there. That and not having her mother in that universe. And it had been a relief in some way that Rachel and Greg-the-jackass had moved away to Chicago because she didn’t have to either pretend to be the other Olivia around Rachel. She was the one person most likely to have spotted the fake. In other ways it made it so much harder knowing there was a Rachel out there and feeling unable to talk to her. 

When Olivia turned to go back to the bridge to her own universe, she didn’t think that much about the other Lincoln beyond the initial shock at seeing him. The brief glimpse gave her the impression that he wasn’t a lot like her friend. Her Lincoln knew how to have fun, this guy didn’t look like he did. He looked kind of a geek. And what did it matter anyway? She’d interact with the Other Side when she absolutely had to, but she wasn’t exactly going to hang out with any of them out of work. So she’d turned around and walked away, determined to shake off the dirt of the other universe. She went out, spent some time with her own Lincoln and with Charlie to celebrate Charlie’s last night of freedom before he married the bug girl, and put anything to do with Over There from her mind.

 

*****   
Charlie had made some joke once about how Olivia and Lincoln had some kind of Vulcan mind meld because of the number of times they’d come to the same conclusion on a case. Olivia had just laughed it off at the time, although she did have to acknowledge that she could see where he was coming from. She just wished the mind meld had kicked in at that Christmas party.

Despite the growing bond between Olivia and her partners, she hadn’t talked about Frank at work. It was a relatively new relationship and at that stage Rachel had been the only person she really talked about him with at all. In hindsight, maybe she should have thought of that before deciding to bring him as she could then have avoided the uncomfortable situation later.

She’d introduced Frank to Charlie as they’d both arrived at the same time. That had been fine. Lincoln hadn’t been around then as Colonel Broyles had taken them aside to introduce Olivia to his family while Lincoln was talking to Astrid, trying to help her to feel included, so he’d missed the introduction. Olivia hadn’t thought anything of it. She didn’t know about his feelings for her. The last thing she was expecting was for Lincoln to try and kiss her. Olivia had hastily pulled away, not knowing if Frank had seen. Thankfully, Charlie had cornered Frank at the time to ask him whether he had any suggestions for dealing with his arachnids, but as he was making his way over, Olivia hadn’t much time to explain. By the time Frank had rejoined Olivia, she and Lincoln had pulled themselves together and he hadn’t noticed anything was amiss. 

Frank never did find out what had happened, but things between Olivia and Lincoln had been strained for a few weeks after that. Charlie had tried to talk to them separately about it, kept planning nights out for the three of them together but either Lincoln made some excuse and didn’t go, or the three of them would just sit there awkwardly, Charlie trying to keep the conversation going while Lincoln and Olivia just made monotonous responses. It was at times like that when Olivia wished she could stand the taste of drink, just so she could distract herself on these nights.

After a few weeks of this, the team were called to a Class Four vortex in the neighbourhood where Charlie had grown up. Knowing that this call was more personal than most, Olivia and Lincoln had tried to put their own issues aside in order to help him deal with it. 

Broyles had started trying to call them back, telling them it wasn’t safe due to the rate at which the vortex was opening. But Lincoln was determined to get as many people as he could away from the vortex before it got any worse.

“There’s no time,” Charlie had yelled. “Lincoln, get the hell out!”

Olivia had reached for him, grabbed him around the waist and yanked him back to safety just as the vortex began to open.

“Liv?” Lincoln had blinked in the sunlight. “Did you just save my life?”

“I...I guess I just did.”

She had. And she had also saved their friendship, which was back to its old free and easy state after that. Olivia had received a commendation for that, her first. And she finally felt that she had proved herself to Broyles. But what had mattered so much more was that she had her friendship with Lincoln back.  
***** 

The first time Olivia had really worked with Over There’s Lincoln, her own Lincoln had immediately written him off as “a nut job”. At first glance, Olivia couldn’t see anything to contradict that. Secretary Bishop, wanting them dead? Crazy. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was that had made her start to trust him, especially with what he was coming out with. Was it what he told her Peter had said, that he knew she was a good person and could be counted on to do the right thing? Or was it because she’d realised that their Lincoln’s original comments only echoed her own thoughts on the other universe and that cooperation was never going to work as long as they both felt the same way towards each other? 

But working the case of Jones and his shapeshifters with Lincoln had led to Olivia starting to feel more positive towards their counterparts, to realise that they were people just like themselves, fighting to save both universes.

It was strange, but after a while, being around Lincoln from Over There had made Olivia realise there was still so much she could learn about her own Lincoln.

The thing with the middle name had been a running joke for years – Olivia couldn’t even remember which case it was now but they had come across some victim with a particularly embarrassing middle name and Lincoln had made a remark that he’d finally found someone with a worse middle name than his own. He’d refused to tell them what it was for years, no matter how many times Olivia and Charlie had tried to guess it. 

But it was more than that. Olivia had heard afterwards from Over There’s Lincoln about the conversation the two Lincolns had had where they were trying to work out where their paths had diverged, and realised how similar their lives had been throughout their childhood. (The prom story had been a surprise; the Lincoln Olivia knew would never have stayed home just because he’d broken up with some girl. When Olivia had heard it, she realised her Lincoln hadn’t always been the confident person she knew and had obviously done a lot of work to reinvent himself since his Lee’s Hardware days. Charlie had told her once that Lincoln had grown a lot in confidence over the years, but it was only now that she really believed it. And now that she thought about it, his awkward behaviour around her after he’d made that pass at her while she was still with Frank made a bit more sense now. She could totally see this guy reacting that same way.) But then, the way their Lincoln was so determined to find out more about the shapeshifters who’d killed his partner, and the way he’d been willing to break protocol to do so, made her think that maybe this guy showed some of the spirit her own Lincoln had.

And not everything had been the same; for example while her Lincoln’s father had remarried after his wife’s death, Lincoln’s father on the other side had not. It had made Olivia wonder all over again what she still didn’t know about her own Lincoln. Over There’s Lincoln later said the same thing, that he wished he’d been able to find out more about her Lincoln before he died, but he hadn’t wanted to upset her by questioning her too much about it.

But it wasn’t only that. Olivia had thought back to her initial reaction to Over There’s Lincoln and how she’d dismissed him from the first glance – “He’s nothing like my Lincoln”. Now she was starting to wonder if she’d got him completely wrong.

 

The first time Olivia saw the other Agent Lee after her own Lincoln had died, for one moment she thought it was her own Lincoln. She’d realised it was stupid pretty much straight away; her own Lincoln was gone, and she was never going to see him again. 

Even though she knew better, she still had the same experience the next day. He’d stepped out of the shower, just like her own Lincoln had done so many times after he’d crashed at her place after a particularly long and horrible day on a case. He hadn’t been wearing his glasses, and Olivia had taken one look at him and immediately seen her friend. He’d been mortified when he’d realised what had happened, and had said all over again that maybe him being around wasn’t what Olivia needed right now and maybe he should go back to his own universe. But Olivia had said no, she understood why he needed to be there, to bring down the guy who’d killed both their partners. The two were united by their common goal. And after a while, Olivia realised that maybe being around this Lincoln was exactly what she needed.

 

After Lincoln had talked to Olivia about his attempts to track down this universe’s Robert Danzig, Olivia realised she’d been wrong. She’d initially advised Lincoln against approaching Robert – the Robert over here wasn’t the same Robert who had been his partner before being killed by Jones’s shapeshifters, and Lincoln was just setting himself up for disappointment if he tried to replace one Robert with another. She’d tried confiding in him about her own experience where she’d gone to visit the other universe’s version of Rachel and ended up just standing outside her house, afraid to go in both because she knew that if anyone was going to know she was the wrong Olivia, it was Rachel, and because she knew deep down that this woman shared her sister’s face but she was not the same woman Olivia had shared everything with. She realised afterwards that she had been thinking the same way about Lincoln. He walked the paths the other Lincoln had walked, he wore her friend’s face, but he was not her Lincoln, and Olivia was determined not to try and see this Lincoln as a possible replacement for him. How could he be, anyway? As her Lincoln had often liked to joke, he was irreplaceable.

And she was worried about the way the other Lincoln saw her. No one had actually told her that their Lincoln had feelings for their Olivia, but over the time when the Fringe teams from both universes had been working together, Olivia had gradually picked up on it for herself. It had not come as a surprise when Olivia became aware of this; she had known for ages, after all, how their own Lincoln felt about her. When their Lincoln made the decision that his home was in her universe rather than his own, Olivia had said nothing, but she had wondered whether he was doing it for the right reasons. The other Olivia Dunham had made her choice; she’d chosen to be with Peter Bishop. Now Olivia wondered if Lincoln saw her as a replacement for his own Olivia. Over There’s Lincoln had initially mistaken the two of them for a couple. He’d looked a little uncomfortable when Olivia had laughed at the idea, but less so when she’d explained that he’d been helping her get over splitting up with Frank. Olivia wondered whether maybe it was because he wished he had a similar kind of relationship with his own Olivia. However, she hadn’t had much chance to think about it at the time because that was when they realised that Jones knew the tracking signal they were using and had started giving out that free money. But she thought about it now, once their Lincoln had made his decision to stay over here, and she wondered if he even understood why he was doing it himself.

It wasn’t until they had been working together for a few weeks that she understood that she had misjudged him once again. Lincoln had talked to her about his experience with Robert by that point, and how he knew that this guy wasn’t the Robert he knew, but that he was able to build a relationship accordingly. Robert’s toaster had failed on him one day and Lincoln had almost blurted out something about how he and the other Robert had had that running joke, but had just stopped himself in time. It had been weeks before he had admitted that story to Olivia, knowing that she was just going to say that she’d been right in saying it wasn’t a good idea. But Lincoln had told her how he’d put that behind him, tried to remember the whole time that this wasn’t his Robert, but a new Robert he was able to build a different relationship with. And Olivia realised that he must see her that way as well, that he must see her as herself, not as a replacement for the other Olivia. Besides, how could she criticise Lincoln for making any comparison between the two, when she had to admit to having done the same thing herself?

It was time for her to start taking a leaf out of Lincoln’s book, to start accepting that she could build a new, different relationship with this Lincoln, to look to the future.


End file.
